What is your organization's tool of choice? And by tool I mean methodology. Do they have one? Have those in charge gathered and said, "This is how we will run our projects"? Have the laid down the law on how project status reports will look? When project meetings will take place. How formal project knockoffs will happen? If they have then you may be lucky. The structure they have built around what you do everyday may be extremely beneficial to you and allow you to reach your greatest potential as a project manager by not having to think at that level of detail...just do it. Then again....you didn't get to your position of project leadership by just being there and running a project off of a bunch of templates. If you’re a good project manager – and you’re reading this so you either are or aspire to be – then you know you have to shoot from the hip from time to time. And on some projects you have to do it a lot. And, if you’re an independent consultant like me, you may do it even more and that creative, entrepreneurial behavior, attitude and leadership style may be exactly what is getting you the project gigs you’re managing anyway. Don’t forsake that – it’s a personal quality your project customer may be specifically seeking out.

I think we all tend to take a lot of things for granted. I don’t mean everyone everywhere. There are many people who have lived very difficult lives who likely take very little, if anything, for granted. But for many of us – especially here in the USA as I can’t speak for other areas – we have it pretty good and we take so many things for granted that we don’t even stop to consider them…ever. The sun I thought about this the other day as I heard a song mention something about what if the sun was no longer there. In reality…what would that mean? We take so much for granted – I know I take the sun for granted daily. The reality of a statement like that is this…if the sun’s last rays were being emitted right this second as it was burning out, those final rays would reach us in about 8 minutes…about how long it will take you to finish this article. Within a week, the average global surface temperature would drop below 0°F. In a year, it would dip to –100°. Apparently moving to Iceland would be the only real option because there they already heat 87 percent of their homes using geothermal energy and people could continue harnessing volcanic heat for hundreds of years. But building homes in -100˚F temperatures would be pretty difficult. In general, our outlook would be pretty grim and the changes would be felt drastically and almost immediately.

For me, Led Zeppelin always held some sort of mystical status. The only album they released during my true record buying years was 1979's In Through the Out Door. So the really good stuff...the stuff that meant something...is what I listened to with my friends on an old 8 track player at my parent's cabin on the lake on my brother's old 8 tracks while drinking beer. Loved it...but it was sort of like watching an old movie. Cool...but untouchable. Always perfect, would never be tainted. Then, 1985 came and they regrouped for Live Aid. Loved it - they were great, but still nothing to take home from it other than my own bootleg cassette. I remember Mark Goodman saying, "That's Rock n' Roll and they're doing Stairway!" Even when the official Live Aid recording came out, LZ's portion was omitted. And when I go back and listen to it now on YouTube (and on the bootleg I created from those YouTube videos) I can tell that they do, indeed sound much worse than I thought…and adding Phil Collins on drums was not the right move at all. Sorry Phil Collins fans, but he was not worthy. Now...flash forward to 2007. I was so excited about this reunion and couldn't wait to grab torrents of the live bootleg online. There were several versions...even a 'combined' version of the best of...but it still wasn't that listenable. Except I could tell they still sounded good...that it was truly memorable. Now, in 2012, I win the Music Dispatch trivia contest and get the CD/DVD set for free though I probably would have purchased it anyway. And it is - IMO - incredible. Robert Plant doesn't have quite the vocal range he used to have - he doesn't seem to have held on to his voice quite like Cheap Trick's frontman Robin Zander has who can still hit everything. But LZ is still mystical...still magical. Even being able to watch them now rather than listen to the timeless studio recordings does nothing to remove that magical presence - that sort of pedestal they are on (at least in my mind) much like the baseball player (pick one...Gehrig, Ruth, Grove, Williams, Hornsby, Cobb, Wagner, Alexander) that you read about but never got to see yet they were still one of your all-time favorites (it was Sandy Koufax for me). Yes, the CD/DVD is worth it (even if you have to buy it, unlike me) and it does do LZ justice and it does not remove that magical presence that the band has always had...at least not in this music lover's mind.

I realize that project management and project delivery can – at times – seem like it’s all about detail. Detailed requirements are needed to document a proper scope for your engagement. Without good, detailed requirements you could end up delivering an end product or solution that your customer doesn’t want and their end users can’t use. Detailed communication is necessary to properly convey critical information to team members and to project clients. If we miss the mark on effective and efficient project communication we may send project team members down the wrong path on their assigned tasks, costing the project valuable time and money that can’t afford to be wasted. Likewise, detail on project status reports is usually desirable as those project status reports are commonly the most distributed and observed piece of project data and information week in and week out. If we aren’t producing detail in our status reports, how will customers and key stakeholders be made aware of what’s happening on the project, what the financial health of the project is, where the project stands in relation to it’s anticipated delivery schedule, and what issues are being dealt with at any given point in time?

As project managers we often live and die by the percent complete of the tasks on our project schedules. We obsess over them and compare the tasks to the calendar dates. Are we as far along as we should be? Is my assigned resource making progress? And what, exactly, does 43% complete really mean? What does it look like? If you're like me it looks about like the progress in my new house that my contractor has made up to this point when he was supposed to be done a little over a month ago. Ugh! But I digress... You can understand my frustration - and skepticism - with the reporting of percent complete from project staff. How many times have you relied on your project team to supply you with weekly (perhaps even daily?) percent complete updates on some of their key tasks and curiously the progress reported sometimes rises by 1% over the previous week’s report. 1%. What is that? And we often don’t question it because it is at least showing progress, there isn’t anything going on that is a showstopper for the project and we’re too busy to dig deeper into that 1% progress report. But if we took the time to step back and look at the reporting week to week we would see that one or more team members may just be upping the % in order to show at least some progress on paper. Is that good? Not really. It works for a while, but it can be masking an underlying problem.

New concepts, new products, new ideas. They are all important...of course. Without them we would never have anything new, we would never have new technology to implement and we would never have new foods to try. Life would be boring. This past week I attended CES 2014 in Las Vegas. That show - attended by more than 150,000 gadget hungry industry affiliates, buyers, and industry analysts (like me) - is all about introducing new technology and new gadgets into our lives. Most products are failures and never see the light of day, but many do and become staples in our everyday lives over the next 5 to 10 years.

Proactive. What does it mean to you? A check into its definition reveals this: "creating or controlling a situation by causing something to happen rather than responding to it after it has happened." Sounds correct. What I would like to discuss here is ways we can be proactive on the projects we are managing and, thus, remain more in control of them, rather than always being in reactive mode to the issues that arise and threaten to knock us off course. Three big areas where passive management can get a PM into trouble – in my opinion – are customer management, risk management and budget oversight. So, I would like to focus on these three and how we can hopefully avoid issues – at least major issues – by practicing proactive, rather than reactive management in these areas.

In order to get stakeholders or management to approve your project, you will need to build a business case to demonstrate why the project is needed and what the benefits of the project will be when it is finished. The reasons and benefits of your project may seem perfectly obvious to you and others who are intimately involved with it, but to stakeholders and other decision makers it may not be so obvious. Oftentimes, they are dealing with a myriad of different business units and objectives and tasks that need to be done. A well prepared business case can help your project standout in the crowded field of everything that is happening in the company and might just be the key to getting approval and finances for your project. Here are the basic steps for creating the business case.

Delivering on the project is great. On time delivery, on budget delivery. Fantastic. Delivering exactly what your client asked for? Pretty nice. Delivering exactly what your client needs? Even better. Some clients expect more than we are planning to deliver. Some expect less. Setting those expectations properly out of the gate is a challenge and an art form. And it’s something that every good project manager needs to be able to guide his team to do….no matter what the project customer says or expects. The expectation gap is more the result of a failure to communicate than it is of anything else, and this lack of communication starts at the beginning of a project and extends all the way to the end. This definitely does not have to be the case. It is the project manager’s job to utilize effective and efficient communication to sort out customers needs and to appropriately set customer expectations and team expectations early in the project to ensure the end goals are correct, are attainable, and are what the project customer actually wants and needs. Let’s look into this a bit deeper…

I realize that many of us on the project management side can’t fathom this even being a question. A project without a manager! How does that even work? Calling all project managers – have you ever been thrust into that situation on a project where the customer questions your ‘value’ to the project? They wonder why your hours are so expensive or maybe they even have their own project manager and wonder why you’re even on the project. Have you ever experienced that? Well, I have. Only once – but it wasn’t fun. Most project managers have experienced the engagement when the customer was a little less than thrilled to be paying a high hourly rate for someone they considered to be somewhat ‘expendable.’ And if it hasn’t happened to you yet, it probably will at some point. Most customers are fairly well educated in the process of project management and understand the importance of having a trained, experienced project manager leading a group of resources on a creative project designed to benefit their customer approach, greatly enhance their web presence, or possibly provide them with an entire marketing overhaul. They understand that without proper oversight, chaos would likely ensue. But there are still those customers who see the project manager being billed at sometimes the highest rate on the project and they wonder what they are really getting for their money.

Authors:

Brad Egeland

Brad Egeland has over 25 years of professional IT experience as a developer, manager, project manager, consultant and author. He has written more than 6,000 expert online articles, eBooks, white papers and video articles for clients worldwide. If you want Brad to write for your site, contact him.